The second part of my post about Restless is a conversation with one of the co-founders and head of Marketing of the theatre company – Kristin Bacheva. As found on her Instagram page, she is “a theatre-maker or curious human that loves aesthetics”. Recently, she published her first book – a collection of poems in Bulgarian and English. My role in this project of hers is that I made simple illustrations, based on my initial emotions provoked by the writings. However, this is the theme for another blog post, which I will write as soon as I get my hardcopy and start bragging about it to my family.
I hope you have some midnight snack with you as you read our lovely conversation.
What is the theme of the play?
Rest[less] is a movement piece dissecting the phenomenon of burnout through the curious lense of a beehive.
What do you love about physical theatre, and why did you choose it over traditional theatre?
As I come from a dance background, I found in physical theatre a level of expression that resonates with who I am as a performer, and I kept choosing it over traditional theatre throughout my studies, which led me even into specializing in it deeper.
How do you use movement to express an idea or a feeling?
Firstly I use imagination to access the movement, which then expresses the idea or feeling that I am trying to tell.
Do you use Stanislavski’s questions when building a character?
Depending on the type of role I am working on. If it is a movement piece, I use physical acting methodologies (such as Michael Chekhov or Viewpoints), if I am working on building a character for a naturalistic play, I’d probably ask for Stanislavski’s help.
So what methods do you use when portraying an animal?
I’d use Chekhov’s Imaginary body exercise. I would study the animal first- how it walks, sits, lies, eats, runs, communicates and all those details. After I’ve watched a couple of videos on YouTube as I tend to pick exotic animals that are not around us every day, I’d try to imagine the animal in front of me very precisely. Next, I’d imagine stepping into what I’ve imagined and physically make a step and get into the animal. Then I’d feel around how it is to be this animal and go for a walk around, exploring how it behaves and so on. Once I feel like I have it 100% (and in case I need to tone it down to a human character that behaves like a panther for example) I’d go down to 50% meaning I’d internalize the animal 50% and leave 50% of it to show on the outside, then 20% where physically the animal is not visible at all but I’m still imagining everything on the inside at a 100%. Here we talk about body versus mind relationship or the psycho-physical.
Actually, the methods I used to build my character from rest[less] are the same. Although as my character is not real but built from my imagination, inspired by bees, I had to do some additional imagination work to create it before I step into it. And I only tuned it down to 60% when performing. I imagined myself in a cacoon being born for the first time (this is another exercise from Jaques Lecoq but slightly altered). I only imagined it, while lying on the floor. Then I saw my character ‘Bubar’, a weird looking bee with very long and a lot of body hair/bee fluff, massive antennas and skinny bones but with very big hands and feet. And after that, I went on doing the exercise from above until I had Bubar in my body.
Chekhov’s Imaginary Body Exercise is a new concept for me. I’ve studied Stanislavski’s System in both theory and practice in my old uni. I will try to combine both methods for my animal study, and hopefully, the others will be able to tell that I am a … well, we will see in a week.
Bread and Butter,
Salt and Peaches,
Weetaibix and Oat Milk (because dairy is bad for your skin duh),
On the 12th of November, I had the pleasure to watch the latest version of the show Restless by GOLKK Theatre Company at The Cockpit. GOLKK is a physical theater company, founded by graduate theater students from Canterbury. It all started as a university project for a graduation play. As time passed, however, they realized how much they enjoy working together and how great their collective energy. Three years later, just as passionate and devoted as in the beginning, they are ready to present the third version of their original play called Restless.
credits: GOLKK fb page
Even though I know Kristin for about three years now, I never had the chance to see any of her performances. Knowing nothing but the name of the show, I am sitting impatiently in the audience, waiting for my very first physical theater experience. The lights go off, and I find myself in a world where people are just worker bees, caught so tightly in their daily routines that they do not notice anything else. Day by day, they all do the same things over and over again – wake up, get ready, go to work, go home, go to bed. Even though their routines were different, the outcome was the same – they were all part of a vicious cycle, a made-up life deprived of meaning. Suddenly, one of the bees sees a light so bright and beautiful she forgets she has to work. Following this ray of happiness, she allows herself to feel free for the first time and just rest for a minute. Seeing one of their fellow workers happy, the other bees think she is crazy, so they drag her back to her “normal” life. Losing her only moment of joy, she goes back to being part of the soulless machine.
Watching them play made me think about how our lives are just empty actions devoid of emotion and purpose. We live in a world in which we worship titles and money, completely ignoring our inner “wealth”. We buy objects we do not even need just for validation and to increase our levels of dopamine for a minute, and we pay for them with currency far more valuable than money – our time.
We waste years on jobs we hate just to satisfy our artificial needs created by society. A society that accuses gambling of being immoral and marking it like a vise, but simultaneously promotes social platforms built on the same principles as the slots in a casino. A society where freedom of choice is just a concept and everyone is a part of a carefully targeted audience of an algorithm.
credits: moi (such a great photographer)
The play leaves the audience with an open ending: the last bee sees the light … and the curtains fall. So what will happen next? In the end, we are responsible for our happiness. As we know from the butterfly effect: even a small change could have a great impact. Sometimes, one person can spark the fire of a thousand others and break the system.
But enough with my existential monologue.
From an animator’s point of view, watching the play showed me the power of movement. Even the slightest change in the behavior of the actors brought something new to the performance. Simply, by watching their daily routines, I was able to understand their characters and see their personality traits. Observing the sense of touch, I knew which two bees were a couple and that they have some unresolved issues with each other.
To learn more about physical theatre and how to use it more successfully, as we have to present our animal analysis in a week, I asked Kristin to tell me more about her experience and some practices she uses to prepare for her performances. I will post the short-no-so-much-of-an-interview conversation in the next couple of days.
Building upon Carla’s presentation about Female Representation in the film industry and “The Male Gaze” in cinema, I decided to share my research on “the gaze” found in two of the movies of one of my favorite movie directors – Alfred Hitchcock.
“Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare“
This is how Alfred Hitchcock explains his filmmaking philosophy. Widely known as the king of suspense, had a sixty years career, throughout which he explored new revolutionary cinematic techniques and helped the development of the drama and psychological thriller genre tremendously. His movies are filled with suspense and terror, created through the brilliant use of juxtaposition of characters and sound, and camera movement.
Despite being so influential in the human psyche and emotions, Hitchcock’s opinion on psychoanalysis is rather controversial. He undermined the significance of it as a scientific field but found useful the psychoanalytical concepts and approaches in his narratives, as a tool to shock and scare the audience. His work is still influential, and film critics and scholars have written thousands of analyzes on movies like Psycho and Vertigo.
One of the most notable psychoanalytical elements in a Hitchcock movie is what film critics and psychoanalysts call the look. The look“is like the cement that ties Hitchcock’s narratives together” (Walker, 177) as it is “a crucial structure feature in his films”. The change of perspective in his movies helps the audience identify with the protagonist and establishes a relationship between the spectator and the characters (Walker, 177). Clifford Manlove in her article Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey, states that “Freud and Lacan’s theories focus on the interaction of pleasure and repetition necessary for subjectivity itself, whether masculine or feminine.” (90). In this way, Hitchcock used different cinematic techniques to “reinforce the power of looking in cinema” (90). Manlove discusses the slip between the gaze and the eye. The camera is “subjective”, and the viewers are forced to see the scenes from the point of view chosen by the director. Therefore, the spectators “gaze” is limited, and certain parts of the film are left without an answer on purpose.
Psycho is unarguably one of the best horror and suspense films of all time. In this Hitchcock classic,this subjectivity of the gaze can be found in the occurrence that the audience never sees Norman talking to his mother. It is always someone who overhears them talking, but we never see the action. This creates an image of suspense and mysticism. In the article Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, in Psycho, William Rothman states that “the camera itself is called upon to suffer incarnation” (260) thus creating a mystic world of the movie where reality and fantasy merge and fuse. The cinematic apparatus shows the narrative through the gaze of the mother. There is a separation between the eye and the gaze. Marion’s vision is limited, she is a passive victim of a greater gaze. Hitchcock’s camera point of view separates the viewers from the heroine, but yet “reveals close familiarity with her mind” (269). The audience sees her consumed by her thoughts in her car in one of the first scenes when she had just escaped with a large sum of money. The scene can be analyzed as a visual representation of her nightmare where her mind is filled with doubts and the fear of being caught.
Collage. Psycho (1960)
Cinematically, Hitchcock uses changes in the depth of the background of light and darkness to create an image of the parallel objective reality and the subjective mind of the protagonist. The gaze in Psychocan be analyzed through the uncanny – the Freudian concept of experiencing something familiar, yet unfamiliar that creates trouble in the mind, i.e. seeing something common in a new strange way. The uncanny is also connected to one’s desires. The main protagonists, Norman and Marion, are uncanny doubles of each other. At the end of the first scene, Marion looks straight to the camera and smiles. In the end of the movie, when Norman is caught, and the mystery is solved, he does exactly the same, which could be interpreted as a hidden symbol that both characters are in fact uncanny doppelgangers. They both have anxieties of being judged and accused of their crimes, presented by their inner voices. The mother’s gaze presses both Marion and Norman. However, while Marion is the passive object of the gaze, Norman is seen as an active viewer. At the beginning of the movie, in a scene where Marion says that she wants to have dinner with Norman in her house where the picture of her mother will be on the wall, indicates the presence of the gaze of authority. Later on in the film, we see the silhouette of Norman’s mother spying from the window. The audience never sees the mother, but her possessive and controlling gaze is present until the very end of the movie. It feels like the house itself is part of this “gaze” – the paintings on walls, the mirrors, and the stuffed animals starring at Norman and Marion as they have dinner together.
Female Representation in Psycho:
Shower scene, Psycho (1960)
The heroine is a victim of the powerful male gaze: she is paranoid and anxious because she does not understand the intentions of the spectator. Even after changing her car and escaping from the eyes of the law, Marion is still a subject of the gaze of the camera. The audience follows her as she finds a safe place where she can stay over for the night, where she becomes a victim of Norman Bates’ “gaze of desire”. The male gaze is reinforced in the scene where Norman watches Marion undress through a hole in the wall. According to Rothman “this hole-within-a-hole is changed symbolically; it is an eye, and it is an emblem of female sexuality” (296). The audience’s point of view is “the deferred view” and we are watching Marion together with Norman, but we are furthermore in possession of the authoritarian gaze of Hitchcock’s “eye” – Norman is watching through the peephole as “a subject of the camera, a creature who can be framed in its view” (296). However, the greater gaze of the viewers is also limited as it is derived from the view of the naked body of the heroine. Hitchcock used cuts to limit the vision of the audience thus creating the feeling of suspense and ambiguity (297).
The sequence in the shower is one of the most analyzed scenes in the history of cinema. In these iconic 45 seconds of Marion taking a shower, Hitchcock uses 78 camera setups and 52 cuts to create the brutal image of the murder without even showing the actual action. It is presented as a rape, an act of penetrating her intimate world, her “love scene” with the shower in the role of the partner (Rothman, 300). The point of view of the voyeuristic gaze in the scene is the shower. It is “the peephole through which our gaze penetrates the shower curtain and through which Norman’s gaze continues to possess the frame” (Rothman, 301). The shower is the “eye” through which the audience satisfies its voyeuristic desires (Rothman, 302). We are interested not in the act as a purifying from her crime ritual, but rather in “our fantasy of rape” which is “disavowal of our own desire” (304).
There are two types of gaze in the movie that present a “split between the eye and the gaze” (Manlove, 91): (1) Scottie’s gaze that kills Judi and her “failure” to be the woman from his fantasy, and (2) a greater gaze, which is the reason for Scottie’s vertigo, appearing in the opening scene of the accident on the rooftop. She describes Hitchcock’s “Vertigo shots” used to present this mental occurrence as they were “created by simultaneously tracking the camera backward while also zooming the camera lens in; an effect that is repeated in several scenes to mark the presence of the gaze” (92). In the book Hitchcock’s Motifs, Michael Walker states that “the act of watching” is a significant part of Hitchcock’s director style. Hitchcock’s ‘audience-identification techniques”, part of which is cutting, editing and repetition of the scenes, the apparatus shows the narrative from the point of view of the “voyeuristic hero”.
The female is a representation of the male fantasy and it’s doomed to die because death is the only way to satisfy one’s desires. Judi is a real woman, and Scottie is only interested in her just because she reminds him of his dead fantasy. He wants to project his dreams onto her, and thus kill the “real” her. Judie, led by her desire to be loved, suppressed her identity in order to satisfy his romantic fantasies. In the hotel scene, where Judy fully “transformed” herself into Madeline, the three hundred and sixty degree shot of the camera of Judy and Scottie kissing creates a spiral movement around them “emphasizing once again that we cannot be rid of spirals and their spectral suggestion of sexuality” (Belton, 69). The narrative of the movie follows the spiral motif of repetition. Scottie falls in love with Madeline and loses her because his vertigo takes over him and he cannot save her when she jumps from the bell tower. He finds Judy and projects his love and adoration he had for Madeline just to lose her the same way he lost Madeline, further enhancing the unbreakable cycles of human nature. Furthermore, in a shocking plot twist, Judy is revealed to be an actress hired by Gavin Elster to help him to cover up the murder of his wife. So, actually, Scottie loses the same woman twice, and they were both just a fantasy, an illusion of his own creation.
In conclusion I would say that Hitchcock fulfills his audience’s unconscious desires by giving them the active role of the one with the gaze, observing and peaking onto his subjects. The director skillfully plays with the emotion of the audience by the juxtaposition of the camera and the characters. Even without considering the “scientific validity” of psychoanalysis, Hitchcock transforms it into a useful cinematic technique to create an ambiguous world where nothing is what it seems to be.
Bread and Butter,
Salt and Peaches,
Nicole
References
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature. Vol. 14. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Belton, James. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral cite. Canada: The University of British Columbia, 2017. Print.
—. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Ed. James Strachey. 1949 Paperback. Simple Books, 2011.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-Analysis. New York: Norton & Company, 1981. 67-105. Print.
Manlove, Clifford T. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, Spring 2007, pp. 83–108.
Rebello, S. Alfred Hitchcock and the Makin of Psycho. London: St. Martin’s Griffin. 1998.
Rothman, William. Hitchcock : The Murderous Gaze. Vol. 2nd edition, State University of New York Press, 2012.
Sandis, Constantine. 2009.“Hitchcock’s conscious use of Freud’s unconscious”. Europe’s journal of psychology.Oxford Brookes University, 2009:56-81.
Walker, Michael. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. “The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, ‘Vertigo’, and the Film Canon.” Film Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 1986, pp. 32–41.
